In his weekly address, President Obama talked about Puerto Rico’s debt crisis. He said that their economic crash has been so severe that “workers dealing with mosquito control to help protect women and their unborn babies [from the Zika virus] are at risk of being laid off.”

Apparently, legal distinctions are about as fluid as one’s gender identity. If a woman wants to have an abortion, then she’ll identify the “thing” inside her as a fetus; a parasite; a mass of tissue that’s taken up residence in her uterus without her consent. Since she doesn’t identify it as a person, she can kill it without it being murder.

But if a woman wants to keep the “thing” inside her, then all of a sudden it’s an “unborn baby.”

So, which is it? Are they unborn babies – people with rights and deserving of protection – or are they nothing more than lumps of tissue? They can’t both be true. It’s this kind of cognitive dissonance that leads conservatives to quip that “liberalism is a mental disorder.” In this instance, it’s specifically like multiple personality disorder.

In one sense, Obama would argue that a fetus is not a person at all. It’s simply a mass of tissue. It doesn’t become a person with rights and protections under the law until the fetus is born. This arbitrary distinction is what allows abortion to exist today as a legally protected “Constitutional right.” As to where in the Constitution the act of abortion is protected, no one really knows.

In another sense – in the context in which Obama is speaking regarding Puerto Rico’s debt crisis and protecting pregnant women from the Zika virus – fetuses are not just masses of tissue. They’re unborn babies. They’re persons with rights, and they must be protected.